installing 10.5 on G4 733

I have a g4 tower, 733 mhz, 1 gig ram that I picked up at CSU surplus property. It's running Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu 9.04 right now. We want to try running Leopard. I do not have any other Mac OS available to me.

Can this be done? I've seen some workarounds but they all seem to require a working Mac OS (leopard assist, for example). Older OSX's are pretty pricey for the real thing. I can get Leopard at CSU for $80.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

J

You don't meet the official system requirements. As such, even if you could, I would advise against installing Leopard. The system requirements are there for a reason.

Leopard assist changes Open Firmware temporally to 867Mhz clock speed so leopard will install. I used it on my old 667Mhz G4 Digital Audio for the fun of it to see what 10.5 would do. Works fine for basic usage. I would stick with Tiger but Leopard Assist works fine.

If you want a clean install of Leopard, after you run Leopard Assist, you get into the leopard installer, just format or Partition the drive which will kill the old OSX and you will start a clean install.

Van, it does work for the basics but will bog down if a lot happens. I just did it to see how it would work. Would never use it for any serious use unless I was so poor I could could not ever purchase a newer Mac. I do completely agree with you Van, Stick with Tiger on a slower G4.

GenThree | LeopardAssist - The Next Level for your G4.

dtravis7 said:

Leopard assist changes Open Firmware temporally to 867Mhz clock speed so leopard will install.

Click to expand...

But in order for Leopard assist to work, you need an OS X loaded on the computer, correct (ie the LA disk does not boot, you can't change the prom from the DVD only)? If so, that's the issue, I don't have a copy of panther or tiger (or any other OS X for that matter). I wonder if LA would work on Ubuntu?

It looks like I need to work harder to track down a Tiger or Panther disk.

Thanks,

J

Faking Out the Leopard Installer with Open Firmware

Give this a try. Should work and no OS needed.

What leopard DVD are you going to use? A 10.5 DVD from another Mac will not work as the DVD's are machine specific and it's against the rules to use the same DVD on more than one machine anyway. You will need a Full Install Retail Boxed version of 10.5 Leopard.

dtravis7 said:

Leopard assist changes Open Firmware temporally to 867Mhz clock speed so leopard will install. I used it on my old 667Mhz G4 Digital Audio for the fun of it to see what 10.5 would do. Works fine for basic usage. I would stick with Tiger but Leopard Assist works fine.

Click to expand...

I had heard about it being done on Macs that didn't meet the system requirements but I figured it wouldn't be worth it. I've never tried it like you have though.

That must have been a fun experience.

vansmith said:

I had heard about it being done on Macs that didn't meet the system requirements but I figured it wouldn't be worth it. I've never tried it like you have though.

That must have been a fun experience.

Click to expand...

It was a lot of fun. I miss the good old days of modding PC's and trying every OS under the Sun so figured I would try it. From what I saw the 667Mhz Digital Audio would be as low as I would even dare try. Anything slower would be PAINFUL!

This DA has a upgraded ATI Radeon AGP 4x card also and that helped a bit with video performance over the stock card that came in the G4 DA. The older Macs than the DA use a 100Mhz Bus, AGP 2x Vs 133 Bus and AGP 4X.

Like I said, for just very basic things, it's fine but for anything else, forget it!

I simply love when people try to put good old hardware to use, to get that extra juice out of it.

I've read about people with G4 upgraded PowerBook Pismos ruuning Leopard and feeling good about it. I've read about running leopard in 384 MB ram and people putting it to use.

My opinion would be, its definitely worth a try. G4 Chips rock under Leopard. 1 Gig of RAM should help you out. You havent said anything about the GFx hardware so cant recommend. Still, it should do Core Image in software.

If you did not understand all that, never mind. Just go ahead.

You might want to visit Low End Mac: The Mac Experience and maybe subscribe to their mailing list. Its a really worthy site that will fit your purpose at the moment.

Core Image will work on any Mac with a supported Video card.

Leopard up and running nicely!

I got Leopard running last night. This is exactly what I did. You do not need a Mac OS on your computer to make it work!

I got this from the Low end Mac. dTravis7 posted the link above.

1. Reboot your Mac and hold down the Cmd-Opt-O-F keys until you get a white screen with black text. This is the Open Firmware prompt.

2. Insert the Mac OS X Leopard Install DVD.

3. Type the following lines exactly as shown below into the Open Firmware prompt. If the command is properly typed and understood, Open Firmware will display "ok" at the end of each line after you hit "return".

For single CPUs, use the following three lines:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,\\:tbxi

From there, I just did a normal install. Two hours latter, I had a 733 mhz G4 running Leopard.

So far, it seems to do pretty well. It may be a bit slower than the Ubuntu 9.04 I just had on there, but not by much (these are just my impressions, I did no formal testing).

I was surprised how much hard drive space it took, almost 12 GB!!!!!! I need to find a second drive, pronto, as the drive that's in there is only 15 GB.

This computer is mostly for my son to play around with. He wanted the Mac experience and I wanted to spend as little as possible However, I might turn it into my photo editing workstation.

I love making old computers useful again. We have two old Compaqs with 500-600 mhz processors running different flavors of Linux just for fun. Our main computer is an old homebuilt AMD running at 1.92 mhz with a gig of ram (I like lots of ram) running ummm......windows XP. I have to chuckle at folks who spend $3K plus on computer systems (mostly cause I could never afford that). I think 99% of the time you can get away with a lot less. In this case well under $200 (and that's with the OS).

Thanks again.

J

( @ nbs2005 )
Thanks for the tip. I build and fix a lot of systems and that just never occurred to me to try.
I had a modest collection of vintage Macs that flew off the shelves after reloads. Only have a single G4 Digital Audio left. Had no problems loading Lepeord using assist just upgraded and then used LA again from lepeord to reload again for a clean install.
Also have 2 G3 700Mhz se snows .Have a lotta fun with them.
They work great ,the challenge now is to find the older software ,games and os disks.
I've managed so far to collect OS 8 through to OS X 10.5 as well as about 120 games( hundreds more that work with Boxer) and lots of software programs .
The older Macs still kick it good and are well worth tinkering with a bit.
Think about this if you will for a moment : If the new Macs are so great,...then why are there already so many for sale second hand as well as used parts??? Must be all that Quality you get for the cost .
Anyone tried to download Leopard Assist latley? I'm having no luck.

I just tried the URL I posted above and Leopard Assist downloaded for me just fine.

dtravis7 said:

Core Image will work on any Mac with a supported Video card.

Click to expand...

Sorry to bump this thread but, what exactly do you mean by a supported video card?

Of course Core Image will work. But as the System Profiler on my machine shows Core Image: Hardware Accelerated in the 'Graphics' page, I am inclined to think that there must be machines with no hardware acceleration available for Core Image.

I checked out with people running Leopard on Pismos without any of the graphics whiz-bang, and Core Image is software accelerated in those machines, as reported by System Profiler.

And since the OP did not mention his graphics hardware, I just mentioned the point as Leopard is particularly picky when it comes to graphics.